According to the Discovery Channel:
Until this week, many veterinarians asserted that it was a myth that house cats could catch the deadly H1N1 flu from their owners.
Those veterinarians, along with other health experts, are revising their views after an Iowa Department of Public Health announcement Wednesday that the virus has been confirmed in an indoor 13-year-old cat, which likely contracted the illness from two flu-sick humans in its home.
Although all of the victims have since recovered, this latest H1N1 animal case puts the focus on humans as the primary carriers of the illness, which experts don’t even want to call “swine” flu anymore.
This summer saw the second-lowest sea ice levels in the Arctic in the fifty years since they started tracking it. This ice serves the greater global purpose of moderating weather and temperatures throughout the world. Less ice equals a bigger environmental impact. Yeah, so? That’s global warming/climate change: nothing new.
Here’s what’s new: This lack of ice is having a significant effect on polar bears, and other Arctic inhabitants. Polar bears are starving, drowning and even resorting to cannibalism because they can’t get their usual food. And, as of right now, polar bears are considered a “threatened” species. Read more…
There’s a fungus among us chili fans—and some of the spicy peppers evolve their kick to repel it, a new study says.
Chili peppers develop piquant chemicals to thwart the harmful microbes long enough to give birds and other animals a chance to disperse the pepper seeds, helping the chilies to procreate, scientists found.
Chilis high in chemicals called capsaicinoids occur most in areas where the fungus can enter the peppers through holes bored by insects, and these chilies are hotter, said study author Joshua Tewksbury, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Read more…
According to John Roach
Humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean have recovered swimmingly since the start of worldwide conservation programs in the 1960s and ’70s.That’s the finding from a large-scale, collaborative research effort by more than 400 whale experts throughout the Pacific region.
The new research reveals that the overall population of humpbacks has rebounded to nearly 20,000 animals in the Pacific, up from less than 10 percent of that number five decades ago. The mammals are found in all the world’s oceans.
Some isolated populations of whales, especially those in the western Pacific, have not rebounded at the same rate and still suffer low numbers. Read more…
According to Anne Minard
Matthew, a 26-year-old chimp, is headed to court in Europe as part of a human effort to classify him as a person.
Beyond the legal challenges, anthropologists say chimpanzees are not humans, though without a clear definition of what it means to be human, backing that claim up is a challenge perhaps fit for some great courtroom drama.
Animal rights activist and teacher Paula Stibbe, along with the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories, says she wants the chimpanzee, named Matthew Hiasl Pan, declared a person. That way, Stibbe says she can become the primate’s legal guardian if the bankrupt animal sanctuary where Matthew lives closes. (Under Austrian law, only humans are entitled to have guardians.) Read more…
More than 18 scientists told The AP that they were surprised by the level of ice melt this year.
“I don’t pay much attention to one year … but this year the change is so big, particularly in the Arctic sea ice, that you’ve got to stop and say, ‘What is going on here?’ You can’t look away from what’s happening here,” said Waleed Abdalati, NASA’s chief of cyrospheric sciences. “This is going to be a watershed year.”
2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways:
Greenland, in particular, is a significant bellwether. Most of its surface is covered by ice. If it completely melted — something key scientists think would likely take centuries, not decades — it could add more than 22 feet to the world’s sea level.
When one thinks of exotic animals and wildlife, naturally we think of the Galapagos Islands… but that’s not the only place where you find exotic creatures, and MSN has a wonderful rundown with images and descriptions.
Enjoy it here.
Nearly 200 animals and plants have been added to a global database of threatened species, the World Conservation Union announced Wednesday, adding that the number is certainly on the low end.
From the lowland gorillas of Africa to corals of the Galapagos Islands, more than 16,300 species are threatened with extinction, the group said in releasing its annual Red List.
“The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing and we need to act now to significantly reduce it and stave off this global extinction crisis,” Julia Marton-Lefèvre, the group’s director general, said in a statement.
Read more.
Dinosaurs shared the Earth for millions of years with the species that were their ancestors, a new study concludes.
Dinosaurs arose in the Late Triassic, between 235 million and 200 million years ago, and came to dominate the planet in the Jurassic, 200 million to 120 million years ago.
Scientists had thought the dinosaurs rapidly replaced their ancestor species. Indeed, until 2003, when a creature called Silesaurus was discovered in Poland, no dinosaur precursors had been found from the Late Triassic.
Now, researchers report in the journal Science they have evidence from northern New Mexico that dinosaurs and their precursor species coexisted for tens of millions of years.
Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosauria at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said there has been a long-standing debate over whether dinosaurs replaced earlier species gradually or suddenly.
More highlights:
read more.
Activists say it’s because they were put on the endangered species list in the first place. Either way, they’re off the list.
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